For seven years, the FreeBSD community has relied on Greg Lehey's classic, The Complete FreeBSD, to guide them through its configuration and administration... The Complete FreeBSD is an eminently practical guidebook that explains not only how to get a computer up and running with the FreeBSD operating system, but also how to turn it into a highly functional and secure server that can host large numbers of users and disks, support remote access, and provide web service, mail service, and other key parts of the Internet infrastructure.

Just a few notes from me on this deservedly prominent title: This book, along with the online FreeBSD Handbook, gave me the nudge I needed to get FreeBSD under control and molded into a productive desktop system. All this while I was in the fragile "hey, I'm new and I don't know what the hell I am doing" stage. I received it as a gift from my wife after she spotted me eyeballing it in a bookstore. The book is getting on in age, but it happens to be aging quite well.

As any reader of freebsd-questions knows, Mr. Lehey has graciously made an electronic form of the book freely available here: